The Soviet Consumer in Khrushchev's Russia

Abstract

THE present study attempts to analyze relatively recent trends in the Soviet citizen's living standards. In other words, how has the Soviet consumer been faring under Khrushchev? There is substantial agreement amongst non-Soviet economists that from 1928 to 1953 the Soviet consumer shared only to a limited extent in the overall growth of the economy. Although Professor Maurice Dobb (Soviet Economic Development Since 1917) regards the contention that the rapid pace of Soviet industrialization in the inter-war years was promoted at the expense of the standard of life of the people as loose and ill-informed chatter in the West, the available (Soviet) figures are against him. Not only have realizations in the consumer sector run consistently behind cheap promises, but even by minimal standards the Soviet citizen in 1953 was still shoddily clad, deplorably housed, poorly equipped in household goods, fed primarily on bread and cereals, and working forty-eight hours a week. In recent years, however, important developments have taken place which it is imperative to analyze in some detail. Two sets of preliminary remarks must be made in this connection. First, there seems to be no necessary connection or correlation between trends in material prosperity and political freedom. The oft-repeated forecasts that a substantial rise in Soviet living standards will automatically bring with it a liberalization of the totalitarian political structure are unwarranted and smack of wishful thinking. This is not to say that a relaxation of the political excesses of the Stalinist era has not taken